I have always respected Techdirt's policy of anonymous commenters and wish more more sites offered such functionality.

One feature request:

Would it be possible to identify anonymous commenters per story? For example, the 1st anonymous commenter to a story would be labeled as "Anonymous Coward #1" for all posts relating to the that story. The 2nd anonymous commenter would labeled as "Anonymous Coward #2", etc.

It is frustrating to read the commentary and not know if the anonymous comments are coming from one person or from 20.

What is really funny is that this is in a trade publication that gives away its printed version. Maybe the editor should have talked to the publishing/advertising side first to understand his own companies business model.

Would you prefer no patent or copyright system, but things only exposed to the public when they become actual products? You could sit on your PII Intel computer and connect via your 56k modem and enjoy the internet that way, because that would be all you would have. Many developments in communication and computer hardware have been based on looking at patents and other public annoucements, finding out it is possible, and moving forward. Waiting for the products to actually hit the market before starting that process would slow progress tremendously. We would have a huge market of closed PII computers, but the PIII would probably still be in development (secretly)

I did not know that Intel only released the Pentium 3 due to IP protection. Could you please point to some references of this?

Dan Pink had a good TED talk on how assigning monetary value to results can reduce performance. A good example of how the marginal benefit in self empowering employees can be valued more than monetary compensation.

I am curious how you would apply relational rights from a practical standpoint. If you do not grant property rights or copyright to facts, how do you prove that a "parasitic aggregator" is "free riding" off specific content. As long as they provide only the facts, they should be in the clear.